What He Thought — Les Misérables

One last word. Night and stars might give the Bishop a pantheistical look, as if a personal philosophy had grown until it usurped religion. Hugo insists that no one who knew Monseigneur Welcome would have thought himself authorised to think that. That which enlightened this man was his heart. His wisdom was made of the light which comes from there. No systems; many works. Abstruse speculations contain vertigo. The apostle may be daring, but the bishop must be timid. There is a sacred horror beneath the porches of the enigma. Woe to him who penetrates thither. Geniuses above dogmas propose their ideas to God. Their prayer offers discussion. Monseigneur Welcome was one of the men who perceive the heights of the absolute at the verge of reverie, and he was not a genius. He would have feared those sublimities whence Swedenborg and Pascal slipped into insanity. He took the path which shortens: the Gospel's. He had nothing of the prophet and nothing of the magician. This humble soul loved, and that was all.

He inclined toward all that groans and all that expiates. The universe appeared to him like an immense malady. Everywhere he felt fever, everywhere he heard suffering, and without seeking to solve the enigma he strove to dress the wound. That which exists was a permanent subject of sadness which sought consolation. There are men who toil at extracting gold; he toiled at the extraction of pity. Universal misery was his mine. Love each other: he declared this to be complete, desired nothing further, and that was the whole of his doctrine.

One day the senator who believed himself a philosopher said, Survey the spectacle of the world: all war against all; the strongest has the most wit. Your love each other is nonsense. Well, replied Monseigneur Welcome, without contesting the point, if it is nonsense, the soul should shut itself up in it, as the pearl in the oyster. Thus he shut himself up, lived there, was absolutely satisfied, leaving aside the precipices of metaphysics, the Nile and the Ens, the gigantic archangels of the human mind. He was simply a man who took note of the exterior of mysterious questions without scrutinizing them, and who cherished in his own soul a grave respect for darkness.